12:45 p.m. - 08/06/03
if the earth won't be still,,,,
He says I'm very good at explaining all of the reasons I'm struggling and wants to know if I'm equally adept at claiming and articulating my strengths. He worries that I wrap too much of my identity in illness. And part of me wants to write him back and say, your concern is sweet but honestly misplaced. I know a thousand times that I've been strong and catalog every single way I've shown it; I am not one of those girls with low self-esteem, and it's my recovery, not my illness, that's my identity. (But then, maybe there's reason to worry in that, too.) My recovery is the means to my identity; even my recovery is not my self. Then there's this other part, this other drive, this other section that's always there to create the ambivalence so characteristic within me, that wants to write him back and say he's hit the money. This week at least, I'm one of those girls. I don't know my strengths, I don't know anything about me, I'm a very screwed-up person, would you please care for me? And I guess I could take pride in the fact that the second half of that's no longer true. In the sense that I do know my strengths now. I learn more of them everyday. And even when I back away timidly from compliments, I generally know they are true. So Dear Sir, do not worry. My depression no longer has the power to interfere with the fundamental knowledge of myself. Not much, anyway. So don't worry about me. Don't worry about me. Don't bother with me.
God, how I want to be past the point where I'm compelled to transform again into that girl who can't stand on her own two feet, just so soemone will put their fucking arm around me. I'm thinking this morning of the baby that kept showing up in my guided imagery work with Lisa and Jenifer. The baby was falling through the air and there was no one there to catch her, and then the baby was in a basket with a blanket, and then all around the basket were hands with sweet notes. That last is the picture I took home. And Jenifer worried that there were too many hands too close, trying to get in, and I told her that wasn't how the piece felt to me. Now I want to say, that baby's in the middle of the paper again, and all the hands have been erased. She's no longer falling through space, but she's an infant and she wants someone to pick her up now and again. She's older than she should be, and she doesn't want to only have people around to love her when she cries.
I want to go home.
I could call, but it seems too early; even though I know the whole point of calling is so that I can do it when I need to, it seems like there hasn't been enough time. Plus, if I call now, I'll probably get Steph again, and it would be weird to talk to her again so soon. Oh, wait, they're at lunch. I would get no one. I want someone. Hell, I want Dave. I want my Superdoc. I want Christy, who I barely knew for two weeks, who showed up in my dream last night. I want someone here with arms, willing to come close enough to my pain to ease it just a little, far enough from its source that they could do so. i.e. I do not want my parents, the only option that I have. I would like very much to be held right now. I would like very much to go home right now.
But hey, I got an e-mail from Stacy; her computer's back up. It was a mass announcement, but it won't be long until I hear from her personally, right, and then who knows, any day now Brea should grab the time from her crazy schedule to write me the real note she promised in a quick one. Sara will be discharged soon, and as hard as that will be, we'll probably be talking more. See, but, I keep screwing up. I wrote four entries yesterday (two nourish, one caged, one chord), and I don't think I wrote any of them - except perhaps the one at caged - for any other reason than to have someone respond. See I want to be home. I want to have home. I want to have the people who can call it that with me.
And I don't want to move with my mom into the city. I don't want to commit to living with her again. I don't want to commit to living with her alone. I don't want to be in an apartment with her. I don't want to be alone in a crowd instead of in the wilderness. I don't want to have to do all the work I'm going to have to do to find one friend... No, wait, I have one friend already. He wants to know if I have the same grasp of my strengths that I do of my pain. I don't know how to explain to him that I'm only aware of my strengths because of what I've done with my pain. I don't know how to tell him that it isn't my parents' divorce that's breaking my home; it's this place called Rogers that didn't quite work out.
Would it have been so fucking much? To make an exception? To give me the chance to live close enough not to have to feel my heart break again and again and again...
This "friend" still needs a nickname, unless I'm going to gather the guts to call him who he really is.
I don't know why I feel so bad or what I'm supposed to do with it or how I'm supposed to make it to Monday or how to explain it to Heiz^ or why I should have to. You know, I don't have to. You know, he's not my therapist, and just because he wants to talk on deeper levels doesn't mean I have to answer every time. You know, it's not his place to worry about me. It's not his place to decide what my struggles are. He can't be another of these older-sibling types convinced he's been through everything I have. I can't stand that. I don't need that. And I am bleeding from needing too many things already, so don't - on top of that - give me what I don't want.
Stacy, I'm caught in the subway. My golden ticket said it's been swiped too many times. It says I need to wait and use it again later. And I'm trying to wait out the time, but I've killed so much of it over the past, sometimes I think it's going to gather itself together and try to kill me.
This is just what "I miss you" sounds like the 4700th time you cry the words.
chord
^nickname inserted; teacher I had senior year who I am getting acquainted with via e-mail
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